Rebuild My PC – Part 1

So, for those that don’t know me, I like to make my own desktop machines… just because I’m particular in terms of what goes into it… Of course, there are nightmare-ish issues that go with it when things don’t work well together, but that’s part of the challenge fun.

[td_block_text_with_title custom_title=”My Current Setup” header_color=”#1e73be”]My current desktop hasn’t been updated for about 3 years. While desktop technologies hasn’t really improved that much in that time, I still kinda wanted to upgrade since there are a lot of advances in the underlying system architectures which gives more speed for memory and I/O functions.

Gigabyte GA-Z77UDH5 Motherboard

32 GB of Crucial DDR3 Memory

1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD (as Boot/System drive)

6TB of SATA hard drive space for data

BD-R/W and BD-Reader drives

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 Graphics Card (3GB)

750W OCZ Power Supply

So yeah, it’s nothing super special… pretty average for a desktop machine that does some gaming, but mostly does video editing work. Recently though, I’ve been having some issues with the graphics card and my media software not playing nicely, but it seems that’s mostly a driver issue that needs to be worked out.

[/td_block_text_with_title][td_block_text_with_title custom_title=”New Part 1: New SSD” header_color=”#dd3333″]Since I’m pretty much rebuilding from scratch, it would be easier for me to just get a new SSD to install stuff on it rather than trying to deal with compatibility issues if I were to just shove my existing one into the new machine.

Luckily, the price of SSD’s have been dropping, and while I could have gone with an M.2 onboard SSD, I went with the more traditional 2.5″ SSD. Why? Cause the M.2 ones were too expensive for the size configuration I wanted. I kinda wanted to have 1TB of system space… I know that it sounds insanely huge, but programs are big now days. A dual 512GB M.2 array wouldn’t have costed me that much more but then I’d have to worry about if one of them failed since they would be run in RAID 0.

So I went with a decent Samsung 850 EVO SSD. It’s not super fast like the PRO version of the SSD, but it’ll do the job at just the right price point.[/td_block_text_with_title]

[td_block_text_with_title custom_title=”New Part 2: Graphics Card”]The other part I picked up for my new computer is a new graphics card. Why? Why not…

Actually I was hoping some of the driver issues would go away and was hoping for better performance since it has more CUDA cores and is faster. Since I don’t really upgrade my graphics card, I decided to invest more into it and went for a Gigabyte GTX 980.

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So I went with the Gigabyte GTX 980 G1 Gaming Card since it didn’t have the 3.5GB max threshold issue that the GTX970 series had and it was reviewed pretty well.

The thing about this card though, is that it is HUGE. It’s way bigger than my current GTX 670 and heavier (which actually isn’t a bad thing). It doesn’t even fit quite nicely in my current case (well it does, just that you have to maneuver the wiring a certain way).

New card is the one on the bottom.. my old one is the one on top. It doesn’t look that much bigger, but it is…

So that’s the first set of parts that came in so far. The rest will be trickling in over time… and they all can’t come soon enough. I could have tried to use the new graphics card in my existing machine but unfortunately it’s a bit too cramped in my case and I don’t have the right power adapters for it. So best I just wait until the entire new system is ready. Oh well…